upcoming events

...as of right now are on hold. Flare-up season has become flare-up year. Living, writing and working in this particular body, with this disability, means that sometimes extended periods of hibernation are a necessity not a luxury. There are walls that cannot be scaled. I'm taking a necessary break from events right now, so in the meantime, here's part of a past essay for context as I grapple with disability aesthetics in fiction - on short stories and ME/CFS. Follow this link for the whole piece:

​A short story can be held in one hand. It can be read in one sitting and it is whole in its own incompleteness – that is to say incomplete only when held against the long form. The ‘incompleteness’ is an illusion because the short story is moment to moment, it is present, and not one word can be extraneous. There is no room for long, indulgent description, for diversion, no room for anything that is not absolutely necessary. Every word, every letter counts, as with my life with CFS; I have shed so many luxuries and digressions, have had to whittle my days down to the core of what is first necessary and second important.

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Historian Frank Salt and I talk about women's suffrage, working class activist history, disability rights movement history and his work with the writer Sandra Alland - at the wonderful Working Class Movement Library. We both worked on the acclaimed Comma Press book 'Protest', an anthology of short fiction and essays on British protest movements over the last 650 years.

I loved this event. Listen to it here, and if you've got the coin, buy the book in hardback or paperback here.​

about

I'm a British-Canadian writer and artist. I've performed at many festivals and live events across the UK and beyond, solo and in collaboration with other writers, musicians and visual/digital artists. I have most recently written for the new Comma Press anthology Protest! Stories of Resistance, looking at working class suffragettes and forced feeding. My stories have featured on BBC Radio 4, in Short Fiction Journal, and on the literary mapping app LitNav, with poetry appearing in numerous anthologies, including the recent Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and disabled poets write back, the UK’s first anthology of poetry, essays, films and photography of its kind, from Nine Arches Press. My short story collection, Jebel Marra (Comma Press, 2015), was nominated for a number of national and international awards, and I am now working on my second collection, an audio and digital short story map of Hayling Island. See below for more on that.

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'Hayling Island - stories at sea level' - a digital audio map of short storiesI'm currently writing a new collection of short stories to be published as a digital audio map. Working in collaboration with composer and sound designer Caro C, digital artist (among many other things) Maya Chowdhry, and literary geographer Dr David Cooper, we are drawing on memory, experience, and geography to create a map of fictional stories set on Hayling, a small island off the south coast of England, in Hampshire. Exploring economic shift, climate change, and the ways we map our lives, the stories will focus largely on those who live at the water's edge: the skint, the canny, the ill, the queer - the people who face the wind and build lives on hope, grit and shingle. I was born on Hayling, and was two when my parents left, so part of this collection is informed by that experience of carrying borrowed memories, mapping stories of the arcades, bingos, cafes and clubs my family ran in the 70s, just as the arrival of package holidays was starting to take its toll.

This project is made possible by the generous support of Arts Council England and New Writing North, and we work in collaboration with Comma Press and their wonderful wordy jukebox, MacGuffin. Check out the press page if you want the whys and the whatnots.